Web and the History of Science
This session is moderated by GG, Brian Switek and Scicurious:
Why is History of Science important for scientists? How to blog about it. How does Open Access and the Web in general (Google Books in particular, for example) help/hinder the work of professional historians of science?
Discuss:
Hi folks, gg here! I thought I’d open the discussion of the history of science by polling our panel the following questions:
1. How did you get interested in blogging about the history of science?
2. How do you find the historical articles that you write about?
3. What do you personally find important about studying science history?
Now, to answer my own questions…
gg(skullsinthestars):
1. How did you get interested in blogging about the history of science? My thesis advisor has always been very interested in scientific history, and his enthusiasm spread to me. When I started blogging, I decided to write a post about the history of measuring the speed of light, and in the process I realized that Fizeau’s original paper was not readily available online. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I found the paper, translated it, and learned a lot of fascinating detail about an experiment that is usually described in passing in a paragraph in physics books. I was also a little in awe: here I was, reading about a groundbreaking scientific measurements from the original source. I decided to challenge others to do their own history of science blogging and the rest, as they say, is history.
2. How do you find the historical articles that you write about? A lot of the time I find articles through my other blogging interest: classic pulp fantasy/horror blogging! Weird fiction of the late 1800s/early 1900s often references the scientific work of the time, and I’ve come across lots of fascinating, obscure articles just by tracking down the references!
3. What do you personally find important about studying science history? In science classes, we often learn what a scientist has discovered, but not why they discovered it in that form. This additional context is important for understanding; for instance, the Bohr model of the atom is usually introduced as the first ‘quantum’ model of the atom, but it is immediately dismissed as incorrect and inaccurate. Why do we teach it, then? Looking at the attempts to determine atomic structure of the era, one sees that Bohr’s ‘intermediate’ model was a necessary intellectual step in the process of developing quantum mechanics.
What do the rest of you think?
scicurious
1) How did you get interested in blogging about the history of science?
I first got involved in history of science blogging when gg posted his history of science blogging challenge! I immediately thought of two or three things that I would really love to blog about. But it wasn’t just a one-time thing. I’m really interested in making complicated science easy to understand, and the history of science contains the best material. The science we do today is based on all the science that went before it, and some of the stuff we talk about is so old we’ve stopped citing it. But people outside of science don’t know the “basic” stuff that we talk about like it’s gospel. When I blog old scientific papers, I can take this old stuff and show people how it relates to the medicine and science they see around them every day, how a few key experiments founded entire fields studied by thousands, even millions, of people. And besides, there’s not a lot that’s more inspiring to future scientists than seeing the amazing things that people did back when science wasn’t a profession, but a hobby.
2) How do you find the historical articles that you write about?
A couple of places have really good aggregations of historical science in neuroscience and psychology. I’m a big fan of the historical archive on the Society for Neuroscience website, as well as Classics in the History of Psychology. And sometimes I’ll just Pubmed a keyword I’m interested in, find the oldest thing availible, and go from there.
3) What do you personally find important about studying science history?
I think it’s really important to know your roots, to know how we found out the things that we now think of as so incredibly basic. Knowing the real basis for your field puts the whole thing in context, and makes you keep the big picture in mind, which is something that can get lost in your lab work. And it’s really inspiring to think of those guys, doing science in their off-time because curiosity just wouldn’t let them quit.
Hey everyone, Brian here…
I think at some point we should do a little “demonstration” of how to look for history of science stuff on the web via resources like Google Books, archive. org, etc. Nothing major, but just something to show people useful resources and how easy it is to copy/paste illustrations and bits of text to posts. It also might be worthwhile to mention things like the “Turning the Pages Project” that are pretty neat. (http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2008/11/awww_yeah.php) In general, I think we should spend at least some time talking about digitization projects.
Maybe we should come up with a little demonstration on “How to blog the history of science” or something similar. We definitely shouldn’t just be chatting with each other for the whole time. Maybe we should pick out a few really good posts to show “how its done”, mention The Giant’s Shoulders, and show people a few practical things in addition to commenting on why history of science blogging is important.
As for the questions, here are my answers;
1. How did you get interested in blogging about the history of science?
The essays of Stephen Jay Gould inspired me to start reading more books on the history of science by authors like Adrian Desmond and Michael Rudwick. What I read about largely dictates what I write about on my blog, and so it was a natural sort of transition.
2. How do you find the historical articles that you write about?
I don’t often write about historical articles as much as I write about ideas, people, or particular events. In fact, I think I spend more time talking about public perception of science and historical science pop culture than the history of scientific ideas. Usually I just pop in some search terms (like “Pithecanthropus”, “devolution”, “chimpanzee”, etc.) into Google Books and tell it to return full-view only documents. I browse through what is returned until something interests me, at which point I look for more information on that particular topic. Other times I already have an idea (like my vague recollection about a pygmy kept at the Bronx Zoo) and I try to track down that information.
3. What do you personally find important about studying science history?
So much of what I had been taught about the history of science was wrong. It is far more interesting and complex than I ever imagined, but people today have a tendency to put their heroes on pedestal and demonize their enemies. By looking at science in a historical context, though, we can trace the development and interconnection of different ideas and gain a better appreciation for what was, at one time or another, cutting-edge science. It also teaches the lesson that even though we have come a long way, science is not a dispassionate process carried about by 100% objective robots. People have biases and are influenced by factors outside the small community of science, and who knows what future historians might write about us!
Note by gg: I wrote up some of my thoughts about the session at my blog here. The (very skeletal) slide presentation I used at the talk can be found there, as well.
